The Aesthetics notes are meant to answers to recurring questions on productivity, advised from daily logs recorded over many years.

Foreword

This is less a personal guideline than the results of side-effects. It is not about achieving happiness, as I could not find correlations between happiness and productivity; productivity occured equally during low happiness and high happiness.

Part a

I have based my life toward two aspirations, Arts & Sciences. I have thus devised th my life to be aimed their sole acceleration. Analysis of personal statistics revealed travel to be an important enabler for inspiration, and so I have steered my work toward facilitating opportunities to travel. A step away from Arts & Sciences was then, a step backward.

Optimizing toward more income showed less progress than optimizing toward the need for less revenue.

School was forcing me into multi-tasking, which revealed itself to have a negative impact to the creation of Arts & Sciences. Working within the confines of a single medium, would invoke long periods of lesser creativity and intermittent productivity. Living at any one place over a period exceeding multiple years showed a decay in inspiration. Leaving school, learning to play music, moving abroad - showed an improvement in the realization of Arts & Sciences.

Automating work always returned higher reward than any attempt at brute force. The least amount of acting required for any one task, the better. Over a period of time, building specific tools mostly returned higher performance than learning general purpose tools.

Part b

Remaining immobile in moments of doubts and planning, always gave a positive outcome, against acting randomly which made possible taking accidental steps away from the goals.

I have kept daily logs on personal productivity output & creative input, and graphed this data to predict, and steer, creativity patterns. Each day has the completion of a singular task & a singular medium assigned. The output portion of the day(programming, designing, composing), ends with the completion of the task, whereas the remaining time is spent on input(reading, watching, listening).

The purpose of this discipline is to limit multi-tasking.

When a day ends before its assigned task is complete, the day was a planning failure; the task is then divided into smaller tasks, each assigned to a day. When the day ends too early after the completion of the one task, the day was also a planning failure.

Part c

I do not get out of bed until I have chosen a task to complete & and a lesson to learn, and I do not go to sleep until I have logged the results.

In the following order, I first address the problems that slow me down, the questions that occupy the idle mind, and the things I find lacking in life.